Most Shared

Truth or Dare: Catfish

Catfish is a number of different kinds of films in one: a documentary, a road movie, and, despite its being set in part in the E- as opposed to the actual world, a surprisingly visceral meditation on what it means to be who you say you are in the twenty-first century of MySpace pages and never-met-you video chats. The two directors, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, document Ariel’s charismatic younger brother, Nev (short for Yaniv), a 24-year-old photographer, as Nev develops a Facebook friendship with eight-year-old Abby, who one day, out of the blue, sends Nev a painting (via snail mail, from Michigan) of a photograph of dancers he has just published in The New York Sun. It isn’t long before Nev has E-friended Abby’s mother and, perhaps more important, Abby’s beautiful older half-sister, Megan. As Nev becomes more and more electronically entangled with the family, it becomes apparent that all is not what it seems; he and his two directors set off to uncover the truth. Catfish is Hope and Crosby’s Road to Morocco meets The Blair Witch Project, Morocco being Michigan, the scary stuff being identity. “It’s a first-person adventure,” says Ariel. “You are supposed to feel it through our eyes, with no filter between our eyes and the little pocket cameras, and what happened to Nev and what’s happening to us.”

If these young directors’ entire lives were a documentary, the opening scene might be on the Upper West Side, where the Schulman brothers grew up. Joost, who was born in Frankfurt and raised in Paris and Taiwan, met the elder Schulman during high school in New York City. Joost codirected Opus Jazz, an adaptation of a Jerome Robbins ballet that Schulman, who graduated from Tisch, art-directed—it won the SXSW Audience Award earlier this year. In any account of the two directors’ lives, the spotlight would inevitably fall on Nev—even during coffee near the filmmakers’ office, in SoHo. “I’m a risk taker,” Nev says, “and for the first few—let’s just say 20—years of my life my risk assessment wasn’t as fine-tuned as it is now.”

According to all three, the film snuck up on them, since they document a lot of their lives anyway, especially the parts with Nev involved. “Let me put it this way,” Ariel says. “Every time I film my brother, something interesting happens. And if I don’t film him, something awesome happens, and I don’t get it on film.”

“This, we thought maybe it’d be a short film about Nev meeting this little girl,” says Joost. “Or maybe it would be a short film about falling in love that we would show at his wedding.”

At Sundance, where Catfish received raves, there were questions raised about the documentary’s authenticity—is it real? We won’t spoil anything here, but the bottom line is that the controversy neatly coincides with what the film is about: How do we construct ourselves in a digital world? Indisputable is the fact that the filmmakers’ lives have changed. “That was the thing,” Joost says. “We made real friends at the end of the day."